You don’t have to do this!” pleads a young woman, begging for her life from an unstoppable killer. “You know, everyone always says that,” replies her tormenter. “Every time.”
The killer is the unspeakably evil hit man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in The Coen Brothers’ new thriller No Country for Old Men, based on the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy. With his severely-parted, baroque hairstyle acting almost as a helmet, his austere attire, granite physique and unblinking countenance, Chigurh is nearly a personified vision of death for the 21st century, a Grim Reaper with a cattle gun instead of a scythe.
In 1980, a Dallas businessman hires Chigurh to recover $2 million he invested in a drug deal gone bad near the solitary emptiness of a Texas border town. The buyers and sellers killed each other off at the scene of the deal in a “part Wild West, part execution-style” gunfight. After the massacre, a hapless hunter, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) comes upon the grisly scene and takes the money for himself. Two million means that Moss can start fresh and build a better life for his wife (Kelly MacDonald). He quickly becomes hunted, as Chigurh chases him across the American Southwest trying to recover the money for his boss, yes, but more importantly trying to restore balance to the natural order that Moss has upset.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins imbues every shot with rich, warm earth tones to ground the sensational story in a more tactile reality. How refreshing it is to see a film with hues of brown, yellow, and amber and not the repetitive blue, black, and grey fluorescence of techno-obsessed studio films.
The organic sense of each shot directly addresses the taming of the Old West. Did the settlers turn the desert into a garden? Deakins’ cinematography suggests in every shot that little of anything new has come to the West; if anything, what has been there has only gotten older. The emptiness of his compositions suggests the void of the characters’ souls who think that money or power can be their redemption.
Sergio Leone’s description of the West still rings true for No Country for Old Men. “Where life had no value, death sometimes had its price.”
-Christian Blauvelt
